Day: July 4, 2013

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How Many Streetcars Will Fit at King & Spadina? (Update 2)

Updated July 4, 2013 at 7:50pm:  Observations of actual operations at the intersection for one hour today have been added.  These reveal that the level of service actually operated on all routes (except 508 Lake Shore) is less than advertised.  Although traffic congestion causes some backlogs of westbound cars, the number of movements, especially the west-to-north turn, is low enough to fit within the available traffic signal cycles.  This would not be the case if 100% of the service were operated.

See the end of the article for details.

Updated June 28, 2013 at 6:30pm:  Information on traffic signal timings has been added to this article.

The original article follows the break below.

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Real Time Animation of TTC Operations

A regular reader of this site, Daniel Tripp, has created a website that can display TTC vehicle locations and movements with new wrinkles in functionality compared to other sites and apps.

His site is called The Unofficial TTC Traffic Report and there is an explanatory video on YouTube.  As of July 4, it only supports a subset of the network with the major downtown routes.

There are two ways to select which routes and directions you will see:

  • Moving “start” and “end” points around on the map will dynamically change the display to give info on the trip options you have for your journey.
  • Clicking on a route will allow you to add or delete it from the display and select the direction’s service to be viewed.

The routes are shown with colour coding to indicate the speed of operation over each part of the line.

A particularly interesting feature is a half-hour long animated view showing the movement of vehicles.  This makes it possible to review recent history without having to stare at the “current” display of routes and remember what is going on.

Occasionally, you will see a vehicle somewhere that is impossible (a streetcar on a street or path that is not part of the network).  From my own experience, this is a function of GPS errors which are common on certain TTC vehicles.

The app is still in development.  Contact info for the author is in the About page.  Please send suggestions to him.